Quake victims scramble for shelter as winter looms

Officials in Pakistan say tens of thousands of tents are needed

MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan — As rain pelted a muddy soccer field Saturday, Zulfiqar Butt wrestled with a 4-foot length of broken window frame and a wind-whipped tarpaulin, eventually planting the wood scrap in the sodden earth to serve as a tent pole.

As soon as the crude lean-to was erected, Noman Shahid, 12, ducked inside and turned in silent appeal to Butt, lord of the newest manor. Perhaps the stranger would offer refuge to his family.

"We have no place to sleep except in the open," Noman said, shivering in the thin, blue shirt that is his only clothing. The boy explained that his father and a brother died in the Oct. 8 earthquake, his mother was injured, and he and his three surviving siblings were too young to compete with the desperate men fighting for the occasional tent tossed from an aid truck.

A week after the devastating 7.6-magnitude temblor, tents are all that stands between quake victims dying of exposure or surviving the next week, never mind the looming Himalayan winter.

The death toll rose sharply to nearly 40,000 on Saturday, with officials warning the numbers could jump still higher as relief teams reach more villages in the endless folds of the Himalayan mountains.

One relief helicopter crashed late Saturday in stormy weather near Bagh, killing all six people aboard, a senior army official said Sunday.

Frantic building boom

With proper tents in shockingly short supply in Muzaffarabad, a frantic building boom has beset this pulverized city, with the displaced scavenging corrugated metal sheets from the ubiquitous rubble to put roofs over their heads. Bedclothes, curtains and carpets hang from the crumpled metal, rippling in the wind but keeping most of the rain out.

In one pieced-together shelter, Abdul Rashid lamented the chaos and confusion that afflict the delivery of relief supplies. Aid workers fearful of being mobbed have taken to hurling their offerings from the back of moving flatbeds and pickups, sometimes lobbing the goods over the cinderblock walls of the soccer field, inciting a panicked scramble.

With all aid deliveries from Islamabad forced to use the sole road to this Kashmir regional capital, many of the tent-builders have pitched their shelters along the narrow, fissured route to be close to the lifeline.

Rubina Afzal peered out from a white tarpaulin attached to a metal bus shelter awning and surrounded with a 3-foot-high fence of rattan. She had been there with her husband, brother-in-law and six children since they made the three-day trek down from their destroyed village, more than 30 miles away.

Rebuilding the quake-ravaged area will take years and cost at least $5 billion, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said Saturday. He repeated the relief effort's refrain: Pakistan needs tens of thousands of tents to house its homeless, estimates of which reach 2.5 million.

Once the rain let up around midday, a makeshift airstrip and relief depot suddenly thrummed with action. Half a dozen helicopters buzzed the sky like dragonflies, ferrying tents, food and medicine from Islamabad and moving the injured from mountain villages to a field hospital now functioning at the airstrip.

In a tent at the field hospital, volunteer Adnan Asdar checked on the progress of a surgery needed to deliver a baby from a woman with a crushed pelvis.

"These are procedures after which you'd expect patients to spend several days in the hospital under observation. But we just don't have that luxury," he said.

Some aid disappoints

People isolated in desolate mountain hamlets without phones, power or roads even before the earthquake have been descending by the thousands each day, plying the tracks that lead to the roadway to collect food, water and whatever else the relief trucks offer.

Some of the relief goods proved disappointing. When a lumbering truck from Rawalpindi parked at the confluence of a highland trail and the battered riverside roadway, an eager line of the homeless and hungry besieged it. Zahir Abbasi began throwing out heaps of textiles -- summer dresses, light sweaters, empty grain sacks, a satin table runner.

"We will try to make some use of this," said Safbar Hussein, who had walked 40 miles in search of the means of survival for his eight children left living there in the open. "All the help is appreciated, but what we need is shelter. We need tents. We need to get inside at night before we get pneumonia."